Philosophy and the search for truth

Strickland, Lloyd (2013) Philosophy and the search for truth. Philosophia, 41 (4). pp. 1079-1094. ISSN 1574-9274

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Abstract

Philosophy, as it is understood and practiced in the West, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. But even if philosophy is the search for truth, it does not automatically follow that those who are identified as ‘philosophers’ are themselves actually engaged in that search. And indeed, in this paper I argue that many philosophers have in fact not been genuinely engaged in the search for truth (in other words, many philosophers have not been doing philosophy) and as such much of what passes for philosophy is in fact not really philosophy at all.